Escaping the Home…

The Innkeepers Log…

Many visitors ask me what was my most memorable event? Or who was my most memorable visitor/visitors? I have many accounts of memorable events and visitors alike. These extraordinary people teach me valuable lessons life gives us only through experience. The lessons don’t come from history books or culinary courses…they come from real hardship, extenuating circumstances, and harsh realities.

One of the most heartbreaking experiences was during COVID lockdown. We were open because the visiting nurses who were working the COVID Ward Floors at Falmouth Hospital, around the corner from us, needed lodging. We had many nurses here, and those stories were very interesting indeed, but this blog is going to focus on two people who were not medical professionals. During the pandemic we were actually considered first responders here at Frederick William House. A weird label, because I just thought “do what needs to be getting done”…

I had a call come in, from a traveler, an older woman with a shaky voice who recited her credit card from memory. We will call her Ruth for this blog…and her husband, David. Ruth made her reservation and called before arrival, for special assistance, oxygen tank and walker…assistance from the parking lot to her room. She said she needed to be isolated.

I assumed she was going to be utilizing Falmouth Hospital. She had lots of medical questions and needs for her stay. But that was not exactly it.

Ruth and David arrived, in an older model Cadillac, she could hardly see over the steering wheel, propped herself up on books to drive and when I assisted her getting out of the car, fully masked, and covered, the medicine bottles she had with her luggage were in carpet bags of their own. Ruth was in her late 80’s and David was in his mid 90’s.

The first thing she said to me as she got out of her car was, “if our family calls for us, we were never here.” Her phone was ringing off the hook, so she silenced it…I helped David with his walker and his oxygen tank, and assisted them to their room.

And for the first time, as an Innkeeper, in all these many years, I asked…I asked “why don’t you want me to let your family know you are here?” In my profession, the golden rule is to respect privacy and instructions and important privacy requests. But here we were in the middle of the very beginning of the pandemic and I asked. I had to…

Ruth told me that they both had escaped the convalescent home. She told me that the people who ran the facility she and her husband lived in, were locking all the elderly people into their rooms to die alone. They were not allowing families to visit and they were not attending to their residents in any way much at all.  She told me she left after both neighbors died in their apartments alone, through the window. She told me it had been a couple years since she had driven, but her car was in the lot and she had possession of her own car keys…she helped her husband through the window…and they were off and running away like teenagers again…but not funny or cute. This escape was more serious. She and her husband wanted to choose where there were going to die, if this was indeed the end and if Covid was going to take them both out of this world.

Ruth told me this was their last trip together, that she was going to put her feet in the ocean one last time, and watch the sunset with her husband one last time and they were doing it on their terms.

During their 4 night stay, they made it to the beach…it took them 45 minutes to walk from the parking lot to the water’s edge, where they did put their feet in the water for the last time together. They watched their sunset together. Ruth ordered Chinese take out, from her memorized credit card…they ate every meal together. They poured each other martini’s from medicine bottles (so no one would know they had liquor on them) like clockwork at 5:00 on the stone patio. And when their stay had ended…they drove off, their next destination was Bar Harbor.

I never knew what became of the two of them. I was actually afraid to know, because I wanted to remember them both exactly the way there were while they were here. Ruth thanked me 1000 times over. Before she left she told me that she and her husband were young survivors of the Holocaust and they had come to America to be free. She told me that what was happening to seniors during lockdown was just as bad as the Camps during the War. And after that she told me that I made her believe in freedom again.

Ruth changed the way I thought about hospitality, our role in a traveler’s journey. Each journey is different and unique to the individual themselves. All of us play roles in other people’s experience on this planet. We can help others to enjoy it and foster peace and love or we can be unjust and despicable ruining an experience.

I hope we can all be rebels like Ruth and David. ♥️

Sometimes a trip will be the last one.